Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

The Fifty Shades of Grey biography that wasn't

A
tiny Yorkshire publishing house made waves when it announced plans to print a
'biography' of Christian Grey. Then came the scary threats from some bigshot
lawyers. Tamsin Rutter explains what happened next

The publishing world erupted
in a frenzy when a small West Yorkshire publishing company promised to deliver
the "unauthorised biography" of Fifty Shades of
Grey's controversial heartthrob Christian Grey.

Within an hour of the
Bookseller revealing
details of the forthcoming book, the Hebden Bridge-based independent
publishers Bluemoose Books were inundated with requests, including from 20
different European and north American publishers asking to buy the rights to the
"biography". They even had Hollywood on the phone - Universal Studios wanted to
buy the film rights.

The book was to offer a psychological insight into Grey before he became
famous, his "childhood, educational background, rapid rise in business, years of
international travel and his string of relationships and select sexual
proclivities," as written by a fictional former classmate of Grey's, Dominic
Cutmore, and was due to be published last October.

The only problem was
Bluemoose Books did not actually own the rights to such a book – nor did it have
the funds to print such a book – nor, in fact, did it have the book itself. None
of its in-house authors had ever read EL James's erotic novel, let
alone written fan fiction purporting to tell the tale of how a troubled young
chap grew up to be the tall, dark and handsome man of every woman's dreams.
(Every woman willing to submit to his darkest and kinkiest sexual desires, at
least.)

So what happens when a tiny publishing house takes on a project on this scale
and effectively takes on one of the most powerful publishers in the world? Kevin
Duffy, owner of Bluemoose Books, was under a bit of pressure to make good on his
opportunistic stunt and produce a novel which, he had boasted, would "pull no
punches and leaves no stone unturned".He instructed his wife to buy a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and desperately
leaf through it on the train down to London while texting a plot summary to one
of the company's authors, who fired off the first three chapters of The Secret
Life of Christian Grey in an afternoon. Meanwhile, Duffy started trying to
cobble together enough cash to print the hundreds of thousands of copies needed
to quench the world's desire for Grey-related fiction.And, he said: "For a week I nearly became a millionaire." But alas, Bluemoose
Books soon fell off the "erotica" bandwagon they had only just jumped on to,
after a terse phone call from James's New York and London-based publishers,
Random House, whose corporate lawyers were bandying about the term "copyright
infringement". They quickly dropped the idea.

Duffy is not too
disheartened, however, saying: "The reason I re-mortgaged the house was to
publish great stories." (A Bluemoose book, Pig Iron by Benjamin Myers, was recently
reviewed by the Guardian.) The stunt had also put him in touch with
publishing houses in Australia and the United States, allowing him to promote
some of the homegrown fiction Bluehouse is so proud of.

Duffy said that although his company was too small to risk legal action, they
might "write a book about the book about the book. Just about putting the idea
out there, that idea going off on its own steam, and then realising that because
of the cash cow that is Fifty Shades of Grey that means we wouldn't be allowed
to publish it. They couldn't sue us for that. I just get really annoyed that the
biggest publisher in the world can tie you up in knots."Though unsuccessful, the almost-attempt at cashing in on James's success is
testament to the erotic furore which gripped the nation at the publication of
Fifty Shades of Grey, itself a product of fan fiction of the Twilight series.
Publishers must believe there's still a market out there yearning for sex novels
women don't have to hide on the train. But it seems only the biggest publishers
can cash in on it.